The downvote is from someone who doesn’t understand floating point notation
There are actually 0 downvotes, but the 1 is a rounding error
I’ve wondered why programming languages don’t include accurate fractions as part of their standard utils. I don’t mind calling dc, but I wish I didn’t need to write a bash script to pipe the output of dc into my program.
You can only store rational numbers as a ratio of two numbers, and there’s infinitely times more irrational numbers than rational ones - as soon as you took (almost any) root or did (most) trigonometry, then your accurate ratio would count for nothing. Hardcore maths libraries get around this by keeping the “value in progress” as an expression for as long as possible, but working with expressions is exceptionally slow by computer standards - takes quite a long time to keep them in their simplest form whenever you manipulate them.
You could choose a subset of fractions, though, and then round it to the nearest one. Maybe you could use powers of two as the denominator for easy hardware implementation. Oh wait, we’ve just reinvented floats.
A lot of work has gone into making floating point numbers efficient and they cover 99% of use cases. In the rare case you really need perfect fractional accuracy, it’s not that difficult to implement as a pair of integers.
99.000004%
